The Times  

Inside a mind set to explode
Robert Dawson Scott at the Assembly Rooms
11 August 2006

Not all fundamentalists are Muslims or Christians. When Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb in Oklahoma City, his thought processes, however warped, were to do with reaffirming the fundamental rights of American citizens under the Constitution. He had been heavily influenced by seeing his government destroy the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas — who may well have been as mad as hatters and about to commit mass suicide, but probably did not deserve to be deliberately incinerated by the FBI as Edmund White’s new play suggests.

While he was on death row, McVeigh got into correspondence with the writer Gore Vidal. White, another distinguished American writer living abroad, draws on that correspondence for an imagined meeting between someone who is McVeigh in all but name and someone who is Vidal in all but name, at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where McVeigh was incarcerated before his execution.

This is a promising set-up; a tense two-hander with Harrison, the bomber, inside a mesh cage, and the writer able to quiz him from outside. It gets better when the two parts are played by Peter Eyre, the distinguished RSC stalwart who gets just the right tone of languid, slightly effete, intellectual snobbery, and Arthur Darvill, a young actor with something of the sharp features of the real McVeigh, who was already getting noticed even before he left RADA recently. Initially, it is the bomber’s intelligence that attracts the writer; not necessarily to exculpate but certainly to explain. You may not approve of this line of thought but Darvill gives a good impression of a young man who, given rather better breaks, might have found a more productive outlet for his abilities. But frustratingly, the play runs off at the sides in two ways.

In the first place, it rather peters out into a detailed description of the attack which, thanks to Vidal, anyone can now read about and adds little to our understanding of the motives. Secondly, it gets bogged down in the extent to which the young, fit, committed and good-looking man provokes a stirring in the old man’s loins. It may be, as he eventually concedes, that McVeigh never had sex with anyone in his 20-odd years. But I doubt that paying for rent boys in the afternoons, the writer’s solution to a regular sex life, would have saved the victims of Oklahoma City.

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